'Dishonored' Review - Part One: The Wonders Of Exploration And Player Choice

In the days leading up to the release of Dishonored, rumors surfaced of players already getting their hands on a copy and racing through the game in as little as four hours.

I've heard of enterprising lunatics racing their way through Demon's Souls in an hour - miraculously, though apparently it can be done - so whenever I hear that a game can be beaten in a handful of hours I simply shake my head.

There's no doubt that Dishonored could be beaten in just a handful of hours, of course. If you race through each mission you could snuff out all your enemies in no time at all, especially on easier difficulty levels.

This would be a horrible shame, however.

Alec Meer has a terrific post on this very subject, noting rightly that Dishonored is much, much more than a first-person shooter. It's a game about the city of Dunwall, its people and its lore. Most importantly, it's a game about exploring that city and learning its myriad beautiful, dark secrets.

"Creeping around the back entrance to an enemy-occupied townhouse, I stumbled across a narrow, flooded street stretching off into the distance," Alec writes. "Dunwall’s metal-plated walls towered at either side, suggesting something massive, fortified, impregnable. In the water below floated rubble, bodies, misery, but the light played across one iron face of this artificial valley in a sharp white beam, bleaching out the dirt and death, turning this bleak scene of ruin and oppression into one of stark, unblemished beauty. It became a hint of the gleaming metal-Victorian metropolis Dunwall once was on the way to becoming, before the plague, before the death of its beloved ruler, before man’s awful hunger for power laid it so low."

Once I chose to kill a target in a truly terrible way, and killed an innocent he was with at the same time. The act still haunts me a bit, even though I had upgraded a power that turns all my enemies' corpses into ash whenever I kill them without being seen. I never saw the corpses, only the panic of their deaths.

Like Alec, I want to explore every cranny of Dunwall. I want to read every note, listen to every audio recording. I want to find each Bonecharm and each whale-bone Rune. I want to talk to every member of Dishonored's robust cast.

You see, in Dishonored every choice you make actually matters.

Side-quests exist as integral, game-changing events. Nothing is tangential. Even moments like the one Alec describes serve to further the depth of the game, to lay bare its mysteries and miseries.

Unlike Alec, I've played as a lethal Corvo, but I've still played with as much stealth as possible.

Dishonored can be played many ways. You can run and gun, blasting enemies aside and racing toward your objective. Or you can search for each mystery and tackle every side quest.

You could play as a ghost, sneaking past every unsuspecting enemy and using only nonlethal weapons as a last resort. I've played as a stealth assassin, sticking to the shadows and eliminating every enemy I could find as sneakily as possible.

Even this has consequences. The higher the body count, the greater the number of plague-bearing rats and the tighter the City Watch's defenses will become. If you play as a nonlethal stealth character, you'll find fewer defenses in your path, rewarding you in a sense for your ability to carry out your missions without killing.

You can even choose nonlethal ways to finish assassination objectives, though this is often an option only available if you carry out certain side quests.

In other words, if you want to run and gun your way through the game you certainly have that option, but it's not the game's fault if it ends up being a short, lackluster experience. The streets of Dunwall are designed for exploration.

Indeed, "streets" is a poor way to describe the city, because you'll find yourself on rooftops, in sewers, or clambering along ledges and pipes. There's no one right way to go about any task.

"In almost any game, should I encounter a hallway with one staircase going up, towards my target, and another going down, towards nothing obvious at all, I will go down," Alec continues. "In the vast majority of shooters – and I lump Dishonored into that category even though I shot no-one in it, bar the occasional emergency stun dart – that stairway will end abruptly, in a fallen bookcase, a crumbling sofa, a pile of bricks or a mysteriously damage- and jump-resistant Closed For Maintenance sign. In Dishonored, it goes somewhere. An alternate route to your objective, perhaps. A path to a different objective. A letter or character who will reveal how to neutralise your assassination target non-lethally. A Rune, a nest of maddened plague victims, a key that won’t serve a purpose until the next level, or just a new perspective on part of this infected, drowned, proud, painterly world."

Like Alec, I feel compelled to explore and find everything, though I admit to having given up a few times, unable to quite figure out some puzzle or other, or find every last rune in a level.

The design here is impeccable, a truly ambitious and exciting and gorgeous display of building a linear game that is not linear, an open world that is not open, filled to the brim with secrets and wonder.

It is, quite honestly, one of the best games I've played in a long time. In Part Two I'll discuss many other elements of the game, including combat and story. For now I'll just point out that it's exactly the sort of game I hoped it would be.

If you do buy this game (and you should, if you have any love of stealth/action games) do yourself a favor and really explore everything.

Solve all the puzzles. Talk to everyone. Find out everything you can about Dunwall and the world beyond, about its weird religion and frightening power structure, about its politics and plague.

And make it a challenge. Turn the difficulty up above Normal and don't just go for the objective right off the bat. Set limits and goals for yourself, and try to play true to the style you adopt.

This is a game that gives you an overwhelming amount of choice. What you do with that choice is entirely up to you.

Dishonored is being published by Bethesda. It was developed by Arkane Studios. The game launches on October 9th on PC, Xbox 360, and PS3.